Automatic building information model reconstruction in high-density urban areas: Augmenting multi-source data with architectural knowledge

There has been a world-wide interest in using 3D building models to support urban planning, design, and management. For high-density urban areas with complex topographic conditions, how to fast develop such models with adequate accuracy remains a challenge, particularly when a single data source is utilized. This study seeks to develop such quality models by integrating multi-source data including the topographic map and LiDAR data. A total of 1,361 high-rise buildings located in Hong Kong are chosen as the subjects. The topographic map is used to develop a level of detail 1 (LoD1) model of each building. The LiDAR data is then used to fine-tune building shapes, in particular roofs, so that more accurate models with LoD2 can be derived. It is found that the integration of topographic map and LiDAR data can improve the completeness and accuracy of building models. The speed and computations to operate the integration are acceptable. Future studies are recommended to achieve LoD3 building models by utilizing other data sources (e.g., semantic information of individual buildings, and points of interest).

Prior-knowledge-based spectral mixture analysis for impervious surface mapping

As the Architecture, Engineering, Construction, and Facilities Management industry undergoes a profound change with Building Information Modeling (BIM), it seems the right moment to properly re-structure the inherent processes to promote a new wave of innovation. To leverage digital information from each individual project into business value for the whole industry, researchers must borrow knowledge and solutions from computational fields, such as Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Data Mining and Data Science. They will provide a guide to the development, and even transformation of current BIM processes, with potential for development of new tools and automation of many tasks. What is not entirely clear is if BIM could take advantage also from Big Data Analytics, as some professionals are been advocating. In this paper, the author analyzes Big Data problems and the BIM context, and argues that BIM could not immediately take advantage from Big Datainfrastructure. Nevertheless, a route of development is suggested, which extends BIM from its predominantly building-focused models to models that encompass an entire city, which certainly will demand Big Data Analytics. Thus, a new City Information Modeling seems to be the right path of development for BIM as it turns to be integrated with Geographic Information Systems and will lead to tools that would be adequate for future Smart Cities planning and management.

In the process of urbanization, high-intensity human activities have seriously disturbed the river networks, especially in the core urban areas of large cities. At present, a series of urban water environmental problems, such as urban waterlogging and non-point pollution, caused by damage to the river network structure and the decrease in surface permeability conditions in high-density urban areas have received widespread attention. In this study, the effects of the river network structure and urbanization on urban waterlogging were analyzed in the Pudong New Area by using the data of waterlogging sites on the Amap. The results showed that the average water surface ratio is 10.9%, the average river network density is 4.59 km/km2, and the comprehensive impervious ratio is 42.8%. From northwest to southeast, the impervious ratio of the Pudong New Area decreases gradually, and the water surface ratio and the river density increase gradually, while the areas with high waterlogging density are mainly concentrated in the northwest districts. The correlation coefficients indicate that the river network structure (−0.710 and −0.716) has a greater impact on waterlogging than urbanization (0.608) does. The current water surface ratio (10.9%) of the study area generally meets the requirements of the suitable water surface ratio (10.0%) in a rainfall return period of 50 years. However, the water surface ratio and the river density in about half of the districts did not meet the requirements of the suitable river network structure.

Introduction. The article describes a forward-looking technology in the field of construction industry and urban management – CIM (City Information Modeling) – an information model of a city. Emergence of the information modelling have led to the possibility to create the 3D models not only of individual objects, but also of a city as a whole with its buildings, infrastructure, geological and environmental factors. But creation and maintenance of the city models require the software tools. The aim of the present research is to make a review of the available software, describe its properties and field of application. CIM application capacities are also defined. The tasks, which can be solved by means of such a model, are described. The result of using GIS technologies in creating a city information model with respect to the data on housing stock energy efficiency level is shown.Materials and Methods. Within the research, an analytical review of the existing software for creating an information model of a city was carried out, the works of the scientists, who contributed to the issue of urban modeling, were studied. The information sources useful for further research were identified. Geo-information systems ARC GIS 10.1 ESRI were used to create a city information model.Results. A city information model can be described as a replication of the historical and cultural, socio-economic and religious events and phenomena; the three-dimensional models, geo-information virtual systems created by means of the space-based processing and information technologies, including BIM (Building Information Modeling) and GIS (Geographic Information Systems). The software complexes, which function based on the analysis of the valid data and creation of design entities, are used to create the information models of the urban territories. The major companies importing the urban modeling software, Autodesk and Bentley, offer both BIM and CIM tools.Discussion and Conclusions. The term "Smart City" has become especially popular due to development of BIM technologies. This is an innovative approach based on the digital technologies application, which directly affects the activities and efficiency of provided services and rising the city living standard. For solving the thematic problems, there exist the focused technologies and tools of the modern urban environment development. The main task of the "Smart City" is enhancement of the comfort standard of the residents’ living. This task is solved by creating a city information model integrating the information about the terrain, buildings and structures, roads, green spaces, etc.

BIM은 건설 전단계를 포괄하는 새로운 패러다임으로서 2016년 조달청이 발주하는 정부기관 건축공사에서 BIM 설계를 전면 의무화 하는 등 BIM 기술의 도입이 점차 가속화 되고 있다. BIM 기술은 건축분야에서 벗어나 점차 사회기반시설물로 적용 범위가 확대되고 있으며 이미 국내 토목건설 공사 파일럿 프로젝트를 통해 적용 타당성이 검증되고 있다. 이러한 추세는 건설 생애주기에서 가장 넓은 범위를 차지하는 유지관리 단계로까지 확장되고 있으며 선진국에서는 경제성 검토와 BIM기반 유지관리 가이드라인도 출간되고 있는 실정이다. 이에 본 연구에서는 사회기반 시설물의 BIM기반 유지관리 기술 도입의 경제적 타당성 분석을 수행하였다. 교량과 터널을 적용 가능한 사회기반 시설물의 범위로 판단하였고 편익/비용비(B/C ratio)를 활용하여 BIM 기술의 유지관리 도입의 경제적 타당성을 분석 하였다. BIM 모델의 세밀도별로 시나리오를 가정하여 분석한 결과 편익/비용비는 교량의 경우 중간 이상의 세밀도에서, 터널은 높은 세밀도에서 1.00 이상의 값이 산출되어 시스템 도입의 경제성이 있음을 확인할 수 있었다. BIM (Building Information Modeling) is a new paradigm that includes construction life-cycle, and BIM has become mandatory regulation according to the Public Procurement Service since 2016, which accelerates its application. BIM is now expand from architectural field to infrastructure industry. Through pilot projects, BIM has been challenged with verification process. This trend has affected to maintenance and operation (M&O) phase of construction life-cycle. Advanced country has already published their research and result with feasibility study and guidelines. In this paper, we conduct the feasibility study to adopt BIM-based infrastructure management system. Bridges and tunnels were selected as application target, and benefit/cost ratio were used. The result shows that BIM-based infrastructure management system is feasible when the level of detail is more than "Medium" in bridge, and "High" in tunnel.

Building Information Modelling (BIM) represents an approach that aims to form and manage information over the building’s whole life cycle. BIM has been mainly adopted for commercial or large scales building projects while being mostly neglected by small or residential building. Therefore, the objectives of this study are to evaluate the readiness of BIM implementation for housing maintenance in Sabah, to access the types of priority maintenance in house maintenance, and to determine the potential benefits to apply BIM for housing maintenance. This research is focused on the participants of the construction industry in Sabah to obtain their opinions towards the opportunities and strategy of Building Information Modeling (BIM) adoption in housing maintenance. Two method was done which was a pilot survey that was analyse using SPSS and Revit modelling. The result shows that most of the industry sectors had a moderate knowledge about BIM but they agree that it should be implemented by the authority and the percentage of willingness to change from the conventional maintenance to BIM was high. The 3 highest ranked of priority maintenance is the pipes linkage, electrical faults and sanitary appliance failure. Furthermore, a modeling is created using Revit application and access of information which called the Level of Detail (LOD) regarding the items in houses is easily obtain using schedule list for the purpose of maintenance.

The integration of cost and schedule control systems has been an issue of great concern for researchers and practitioners in the construction industry. Nevertheless, the real-world implementations of breakdown structures for cost and schedule are at different levels of detail, which makes the integration of cost and schedule control data quite complex. Building information modeling (BIM), in both four- and five-dimensional (5D) forms, has recently attained widespread attention in the architectural, engineering, and construction industries. Although current 5D models link cost items and schedule activities to BIM elements, it is still necessary to link and integrate cost and schedule data manually. This paper proposes a model to link cost and schedule data automatically following their linkage to BIM elements. First, the relationship between schedule activities, BIM elements, and cost items is analyzed. Then the concept is analyzed with an object-oriented paradigm. Finally, the system is implemented using MS Visual C#.

During subway operation, various factors will cause long-term land subsidence, such as the vibration subsidence of foundation soil caused by train vibration load, incomplete consolidation deformation of foundation soil during tunnel construction, dense buildings and structures in the vicinity of the tunnel, and changes in water level in the stratum where the tunnel is located. The monitoring of long-term land subsidence during subway operation in high-density urban areas differs from that in low-density urban construction areas. The former is the gathering point of the entire urban population. There are many complex buildings around the project, busy road traffic, high pedestrian flow, and less vegetation cover. Several existing items require monitoring. However, monitoring distance is long, and providing early warning is difficult. This study uses the 2.8 km operation line between Wulin Square station and Ding’an Road station of Hangzhou Subway Line 1 as an example to propose the integrated method of DInSAR-GPS-GIS technology and the key algorithm for long-term land subsidence deformation. Then, it selects multiscene image data to analyze long-term land subsidence of high-density urban areas during subway operation. Results show that long-term land subsidence caused by the operation of Wulin Square station to Ding’an Road station of Hangzhou Subway Line 1 is small, with maximum subsidence of 30.64 mm, and minimum subsidence of 11.45 mm, and average subsidence ranging from 19.27 to 21.33 mm. And FLAC3D software was used to verify the monitoring situation, using the geological conditions of the soil in the study area and the tunnel profile to simulate the settlement under vehicle load, and the simulation results tended to be consistent with the monitoring situation.

In 2012, the Carleton Immersive Media Studio (CIMS) started a research relationship with Public Services and Procurement Canada to develop a building information model (BIM) of the Parliament Hill National Historic Site of Canada. The model was created to facilitate a multi-year rehabilitation of the site and was developed using both historical records and highly detailed geo-referenced point cloud data. In the process of planning the model, CIMS developed a unique Level of Detail (LOD) specification for heritage buildings that, in addition to standard specifications, considered cultural heritage value as part of the LOD. As the rehabilitation project unfolded, the possibility of using the BIM for public engagement through the creation of virtual reality (VR) experiences was proposed. In this paper, we discuss the transferal of CIMS’ LOD from a BIM to a VR environment, arguing that the BIM LOD’s focus on cultural heritage value is consistent with virtual reality LOD in that it can be used to guide participants through a virtual reality narrative by inferring that areas of higher fidelity have greater value.

Permanent Scatterer Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (PSInSAR), with millimeter-level accuracy and full-resolution capabilities, is essential for monitoring urban deformation. With the advancement of SAR sensors in spatial and temporal resolution and the expansion of wide-swath observation capabilities, the number of permanent scatterers (PSs) in high-density urban areas has surged exponentially. To address these computational and memory challenges in high-density urban PSInSAR processing, this paper proposes an efficient method for integrating regular grid partitioning and connected component constraints. First, adaptive dynamic regular grid partitioning was employed to divide monitoring areas into sub-blocks, balancing memory usage and computational efficiency. Second, a weighted least squares adjustment model using common PS points in overlapping regions eliminated systematic inter-sub-block biases, ensuring global consistency. A graph-based connected component constraint mechanism was introduced to resolve multi-component segmentation issues within sub-blocks to preserve discontinuous PS information. Experiments on TerraSAR-X data covering Fuzhou, China (590 km2), demonstrated that the method processed 1.4 × 107 PS points under 32 GB memory constraints, where it achieved a 25-fold efficiency improvement over traditional global PSInSAR. The deformation rates and elevation residuals exhibited high consistency with conventional methods (correlation coefficient ≥ 0.98). This method effectively addresses the issues of memory overflow, connectivity loss between sub-blocks, and cumulative merging errors in large-scale PS networks. It provides an efficient solution for wide-area millimeter-scale deformation monitoring in high-density urban areas, supporting applications such as geohazard early warning and urban infrastructure safety assessment.

High-density urban areas have spatial characteristics, such as complex functions, population gathering, and complex forms, that lead to more severe urban heat island effects. Systematically evaluating the thermal environmental benefits of urban spatial forms to optimize the urban physical environment is important. In this study, Tianjin’s central urban area, which is a typical representative of high-density urban areas, was selected to invert the multi-period land surface temperature by relying on the existing two- and three-dimensional morphological data set of communities. The multi-scale geographically weighted regression model was used to fit the regression relationship between the urban land surface temperature and spatial morphological parameters. From this, the influencing factors of different types of existing community spaces and their spatial stabilities were explored. The results show the following: (1) The summer surface temperature varies greatly in the central urban area, and the high-temperature areas are mainly distributed in the industrial, residential, and commercial districts. (2) The MGWR model has the better model-fitting ability. The positive influence coefficients of temperature include ISP and BD, while the negative influence coefficients are BSD, BH, NDVI, and SVF. (3) There is significant spatial heterogeneity in the impact coefficients among the blocks that can be targeted to mitigate the heat island effect. This study provides ideas for optimizing the spatial morphological parameters of surface temperature in urban centers. Future challenges include increasing the spatial morphological parameter selection range, dissecting the interactive relationships between spatial morphological parameters and their effectiveness on the surface temperature, and refining the study’s spatial and temporal granularity.

This study examines how Building Information Modelling (BIM) and Digital Twin (DT) practices can be systematically extended into City Information Modelling (CIM) to enable evidence-based, bottom-up urban planning. Objectives were to map the BIM–DT–CIM literature, identify interoperable architectures that integrate GIS, IoT, and analytics, evaluate mechanisms for embedding citizen participation, and quantify persistent research gaps. We conducted a reproducible systematic review using staged searches across major databases (Scopus, Web of Science, IEEE Xplore, ACM, SpringerLink), exported and deduplicated results, and screened 1,124 records to a final corpus of 68 peer-reviewed studies; data were extracted using a standardised template and appraised with a technical maturity checklist. Key findings show that only 21% of included studies reported implemented citizen-participation mechanisms and 15% addressed cross-domain standard models; pilot projects that operationalised CIM reported an average planning-efficiency improvement of 18% (±4% SE) compared to baseline workflows. Major error sources include heterogeneity in metrics, inconsistent reporting of evaluation methods, and limited longitudinal evidence, which constrain meta-analytic synthesis. We conclude with a reproducible framework and an agenda prioritising standards, participatory evaluation, and data-governance experiments.

This study was conducted to determine performance evaluation items in terms of Level of Detail and Level of Development in BIM (Building Information Modeling) so that EPI (Energy Performance Index) scoring could be estimated in the architectural design process using BIM. First, a flow chart to check EPI scoring standards and mandatory criteria by building types was drawn based on current regulations. Second, requirements for users (input information) and systems (information and points to be automatically generated) by Level of Detail were derived based on previous studies and scoring requirements of architectural items on EPI. Third, a checklist to check the timing for adopting and scoring of architectural items in EPI by Level of Development were deduced using results from the previous step. This study provides ways to optionally adopt method for building energy efficiency in architectural design process. It can be used as a basic knowledge of system requirements to introduce rule checking of EPI in BIM.

<p class="ABSTRACT">City Information Modelling (CIM) seeks to evolve Building Information Modelling (BIM) into urban planning and design practices that are today dominated by Geographic Information Systems (GIS). The design toolbox in GIS software does not relate to urban design elements (streets, sidewalks, buildings, lots, etc.) or urbanist parameters. Urban designers must use geometric design elements from GIS (lines, polygons, and points) that do not correspond to their practices and threedimensional (3D) understanding of cities. This paper explores the CIM framework thought evolution of the architects’ and the planners’ office, the history, and new trends in digitalisation of urban planning and design from a perspective of urban designer and morphological structure of cities.</p>